TorrentFreak

Following mounting pressure from international rightsholders, last year Google finally caved in and said it would start making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. But, according to the RIAA, this was a false promise. The music group says that sites for which Google receives thousands of DMCA notices still outrank legitimate services. To correct this problem the RIAA is now urging the search engine to “immediately make the necessary changes so its pledge becomes a reality.”

One of the Internet’s largest indexes for streaming movie and TV show content is locked in a dispute over the removal of the site’s homepage from Google’s search engine results. Movie2K, the 240th most-popular site in the world according to Alexa, had its main page delisted following a copyright complaint from Paramount Pictures and efforts to have it reinstated have failed. Google says it will not review the situation, even though the infringing material in question is no longer present.

Google is being criticized by copyright holders for the limits it puts on the number of “pirate” links that can be removed per day. The Hollywood -funded anti-piracy organization BREIN wants to increase the daily DMCA cap from 10,000 to 40,000 and eventually remove the restrictions altogether. The RIAA further wants the ability to do more queries to find illegal content and previously said that the current limits are “miniscule.”

From humble beginnings in 2011, last year the RIAA amped up its efforts to have allegedly infringing URLs removed from Google’s public indexes. Fast forward to today and the RIAA is about to hit a historic milestone. During the next few hours the music industry group will issue orders to the world’s largest search engine to take down the 10,000,000th URL on its behalf.

Every week Google is asked to remove more than four million URLs from its search engine. While these automated requests are usually legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. In a recent DMCA notice HBO asked Google to censor links to HBO.com, as well as several other legitimate sites and blogs.

A new report has linked two of the world’s largest search engines to the funding of piracy-related sites. In the University of Southern California’s Advertising Transparency Report both Google and Yahoo stand accused of funneling cash to the sites, which were picked due to their placement in Google’s own Transparency Report. Also admonished in the report is torrent index SumoTorrent for their alleged operation of an advertising network.

Over the past year copyright holders have asked Google to remove 51,395,353 links to infringing webpages, a dramatic surge compared to previous years. The search giant is currently processing half a million “infringing” links per day, and this number is increasing week after week. At the same time, Hollywood and the major record labels want Google to increase its anti-piracy efforts.